"The introduction of this first mass production
item to use the tiny transistor to replace the fragile vacuum tube leads
the way for the long-predicted transistorization and miniaturization of
many other mass production consumer devices. TIers can justly be proud
of being the first to produce a high-gain transistor at a cost permitting
its application to the high-volume commercial market." -internal
Texas Instruments Information Bulletin, October 18, 1954

Transistor
Radios

So
What Was the Transistor Good For?

Transistors may have been useful to the phone
company and to a handful of scientists building computers,
but that wasn't enough to build an industry. Companies were
eagerly buying transistor licenses from Bell, but if they were
going to succeed, they had to come up with sales. They
had to catch the attention of the public. That happened
with the hand-held radio.

The first transistor radio was a joint project
between the Regency Division of Industrial Development Engineering
Associates and Texas Instruments. TI knew that it needed a
fun product to catch the nation's attention. They thought
a radio was just the thing to make a splash. TI built the
transistors; Regency built the radio. On October 18, 1954,
the Regency TR1 was put on the market. It was a scant five
inches high and used four germanium transistors.

A
Startup Japanese Company Becomes a Giant

While the Regency sold out everywhere, it didn't
stay on the market. Texas Instruments caused the sensation
it wanted and then moved on to other things.

But over in Japan, a tiny company had other
ideas. A tape recorder manufacturer called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo
had also decided to make small radios. In fact, they were
going to devote their whole company to commercial products
like that.

Tsushin Kogyo was close to manufacturing its
first radios when it heard that an American company had beaten
them to the punch. But they kept up the hard work, eventually
producing a radio they named the TR-55. When Regency quit
producing the TR1, in the Spring of 1955, the Japanese company
was poised to enter the US market.

The only problem was that the company name was
unprouncable for Americans. They needed a new name. Ibuka
and his partner Akio Morita thought and thought. First, they
found a latin word sonus meaning "sound." That was a good
start. At the time, bright young men were referred to as "sonny
boys," and that was a good image too. Combining the two concepts,
they developed a new name: Sony.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

This
Is What It's Good For!

With the transistor radio, music and information
suddenly became portable. No matter how isolated you were,
you could hear news of the world. And for teenagers who could
suddenly listen to music anywhere they wanted -- far away
from an adult's ears -- it sparked a musical revolution: rock
n' roll.